CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

The Royal Porcupine couldn’t let well enough alone. That was one of the things I liked about him: he didn’t believe in well enough, he believed in cataclysmic absolutes.

“Where’d you get the dynamite?” he said. We were lying on his mattress; he always kept serious questions till afterwards.

“I asked you not to open that box,” I said.

“Come on, you knew I would. You know I love ugly statues. Where’d you get it?”

“It’s not my dynamite,” I said. “It belongs to some other people.”

“I’ve never seen any of that stuff go off,” he said thoughtfully. “I always liked Victoria Day though, that was my favorite holiday. That and Hallowe’en.”

“If you’re thinking of blowing anything up,” I said, “forget it. You’d get me in deep trouble if they found out it was missing.”

“We could replace it,” he said, “with other dynamite.”

“No,” I said. I was remembering the time he’d almost electrocuted us. He’d heard from one of his friends, also a con-create artist, that if you got a string of Christmas tree lights, plugged it in, unscrewed one of the lights, and stuck your finger in the socket at the moment of ejaculation, not only you but your partner would have the greatest orgasm in the world. His friend’s recipe also included several joints, but the Royal Porcupine had given up dope. “Jejune,” he called it. “Fred Astaire didn’t smoke dope, right?” He’d spent days trying to persuade me to perform this act, or “art-if-act,” as he called it; the “if” stood for the element of chance. He’d even bought a third-hand string of Christmas tree lights. “I refuse to turn myself into an electric toaster to satisfy one of your demented whims,” I told him; so he’d hidden the lights under the mattress and plugged them in just before my next visit. He was planning to sneak his finger into the socket without my knowing, at the crucial moment; but we’d hardly begun before wisps of smoke began to curl out from under the mattress. I was afraid something similar would happen with the dynamite.

As usual, the more I resisted, the more excited he became. He got up off the mattress and started pacing the room. He put his fur hat on, a recent one, with Mountie earflaps. “Come on,” he said, “it would be terrific! We wouldn’t blow anything up, we’d just set it off, at night somewhere, and watch it go. Wow, it’d be sensational. It would be, like, an event, and we’d be the only audience, it would be all for us. Ka-boom. It’s the only chance you’ll ever get, how could you pass up something like that?”

“Easily,” I said. “I don’t like loud meaningless noises.”

“Then you’re with the wrong man,” he said. He started licking my ear.

“Chuck, be reasonable.”

“Reasonable,” he said sullenly. “If I was reasonable, you wouldn’t love me. Everyone else’s reasonable.” He took off his fur hat and flung it across the room. “And don’t call me Chuck” (I’d recently found out that his real name was Chuck Brewer, and he even had a job: he was a part-time commercial artist, specializing in layout and design. He told me this in deepest confidence, as if it were disreputable.)

Five days later we were walking across High Park, looking for a suitable place. It was eleven at night, it was the middle of March; there was still ice in the ponds and snow under the trees, it was a late spring. The Royal Porcupine had on one of his fur coats and his fur hat with the earflaps down. Under his coat he was carrying the dynamite in the cardboard box, with the fuse and detonator. He said he’d found out how to work it. I didn’t believe him; also I didn’t trust his motives.

“I’m not going along with this if you blow up any people,” I said.

“I told you, I won’t.”

“Or any animals. Or any houses, or any trees.”

“You still don’t get it,” he said impatiently. “The point isn’t to blow anything up, it’s just to blow up the dynamite. It’s a pure act.”

“I don’t believe in pure acts,” I said.

“Then you don’t have to come with me,” he said craftily, but I felt if I didn’t he might break his promise and blow up something important, like a reservoir or the Gzowski Memorial down by the lakefront, which he’d mentioned in passing.

After inspecting a few likely sites, he settled on a stretch of open ground near a medium-sized pond. There didn’t seem to be any structures nearby and it was quite far from the road, so I approved it. I crouched shivering in a clump of bushes while he fiddled with the dynamite, attaching the blasting cap and unraveling the wire.

“Are we far enough away?” I asked.

“Oh, sure,” he said. Though when he set off the charge, it made an impressive enough WHUMP, and we were showered with bits of earth and a few small stones.

“Hah!” cried the Royal Porcupine. “Did you see that!”

I hadn’t seen anything, as I’d closed my eyes and covered them with my mittened hands. “It was great,” I said admiringly.

“Great,” he said. “Is that all you can say? It was fuckin’ terrific, it’s the best art-if-act I’ve ever done!” He pulled me into his fur coat and began undoing buttons.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” I protested. “Someone must’ve heard it, the police will come, they patrol this park.”

“Come on,” he begged, and I couldn’t refuse, it was obviously so important to him. We made seismographic love inside his coat, listening for the sound of sirens, which never arrived.

“You’re one in a million,” he said. “Nobody else would’ve done that. I think I’m in love with you.” I should’ve felt ironic about this, but I didn’t. I kissed him gratefully, I must admit.

He was a little disappointed that the explosion didn’t make the front page. For a whole day it didn’t even make the newspapers, but on the second day he located a paragraph buried in the Star.

The Royal Porcupine was enthralled by this report, which he read out loud to me several times. “No apparent reason,” he crowed. “Fabulous!” He took the clipping to a photo blow-up service, had it enlarged, framed it in a carved frame from the Crippled Civvies, and mounted it beside the Queen.

For weeks after the explosion, Marlene and Don and the rest believed that I was moving the dynamite around the city, in a 1968 powder-blue Chevy. Meanwhile they were debating their contemplated act. Not how to do it, for they never got that far. They didn’t even get as far as maps and strategy, they were stuck at the level of pure theory: would they be blowing up the right thing? It would be a nationalist act, true, but was it nationalist enough, and if so, would it serve the people? Some decisive act was necessary, Don argued; otherwise they would be outflanked. Already ideas they’d thought were theirs alone were beginning to appear in newspaper editorials, and the Gallup poll showed a swing in their direction. They viewed these developments with alarm: the revolution was getting into the wrong hands.

I didn’t mind moving their imaginary dynamite around the city. It gave me a perfect chance to leave the apartment any time I felt like it. “Time to move the dynamite,” I’d say cheerfully, and there wasn’t much Arthur could say. In fact he was even proud of me. “You’ve got to admit she’s intrepid,” Sam said. They felt I was being very cool.

Most of the time I’d go over to the Royal Porcupine’s. But something was changing. The lace tablecloth in which I waltzed with him was turning itself back into a lace tablecloth, with a rip in it; the black pointed boots were no longer worth the pain they inflicted. Motels became motels, and what they meant to me now was hard work and embarrassment. Sturgess was sending me on yet more trips, to Sudbury, to Windsor, and it was costing me more and more to get through the interviews.

Afterward I would go back to the motel and wash out my underwear and pantyhose in the bathroom sinks, squeezing them in towels and draping them over coat hangers. In the mornings they were never quite dry but I would put them on anyway, feeling the clammy grub-gray touch against my skin. It was like dressing in the used breath of other people. While the Royal Porcupine sat on the bed’s edge, white and skinny as a root, and asked me questions.

“What’s he like?”

“Who?”

“You know, Arthur. How often do you.…”

“Chuck, it’s none of your business.”

“It is my business,” he said. He didn’t pick up on the name; he was becoming less and less like the Royal Porcupine and more and more like Chuck. “I don’t ask you those things about your lady friends.”

“I made those other women up,” he said sulkily. “There’s no one but you.”

“So who leaves the pumpkin cakes?”

“My mother,” he said. I knew this was a lie.

He’d always lived in his own unwritten biography, but now he started seeing the present as though it was already the past, bandaged in gauzy nostalgia. Every restaurant we ate in he left with a sigh and a backward glance; he spoke of things we’d done the week before as if they were snapshots in some long-buried photograph album. Each of my gestures was petrified as I performed it, each kiss embalmed, as if he was saving things up. I felt like a collectable. “I’m not dead yet,” I told him more than once, “so why are you looking at me like that?”

This was one of his moods. In another he would be openly hostile towards me. He began to take a morbid interest, not in his own newspaper clippings, which weren’t numerous, but in mine. He’d cut them out and use them to belabor me.

“It says here you’re a challenge to the male ego.”

“Isn’t that silly,” I said.

“But you are a challenge to the male ego,” he said.

“Oh, come on,” I said. “Who’ve I ever challenged?”

“It says here you’re a threat.”

“What the hell do you mean?” I said. I’d been especially nice all afternoon, I felt.

“You stomp all over people’s egos without even knowing you’re doing it,” he said. “You’re emotionally clumsy.”

“If we’re going to have this conversation, would you please put on your clothes?” I said. My lower lip was trembling; somehow I couldn’t argue with a naked man.

“See what I mean?” he said. “You’re telling me what to do. You’re a threat.”

“I am not a threat,” I said.

“If you aren’t a threat,” he said, “why are you screaming?”

I began to cry. He put his arms around me, I put my arms around him, oozing tears like an orphan, like an onion, like a slug sprinkled with salt. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t have a male ego anyway, I probably have the ego of a wombat.”

“I thought we were going to keep it light,” I said, between damp snorts.

“It’s light, it’s light,” he said. “Wait’ll it gets heavy. I’m just depressed because it’s raining and I don’t have any money.”

“Let’s go out for some Kentucky Fried,” I said, wiping my nose. But he wasn’t hungry.

One rainy afternoon when I arrived at his warehouse, he was waiting for me all dressed up in his cape and a tie I’d never seen before, a Crippled Civilians maroon one with a mermaid on it. He grabbed me by the waist and whirled me around the floor; his eyes sparkled.

“What is it?” I said when I’d caught my breath. “What’s gotten into you?”

“A surprise,” he said. He led me over to the bed: lying on it was a truly grotesque white pancake hat from the fifties, with a feather and a veil.

“Where did you get that?” I said, wondering what new fantasy had gripped him. The fifties had never been his favorite period.

“It’s your going-away hat,” he said. “I got it at the Sally Ann, eighty-nine cents.”

“But what’s it for?”

“Going away, of course,” he said, still elated. “I thought we might, you know, go away together. Elope.”

“You must be crazy,” I said. “Where would we go?”

“How about Buffalo?”

I started to laugh, then saw that he was serious. “That’s very sweet of you,” I said, “but you know that I can’t.”

He wanted me to leave Arthur and move in with him. That’s what it amounted to, and finally he admitted it. We sat side by side on the bed, staring at the floor. “I want to live a normal life with you,” he said.

“I don’t think we could,” I said. “I’m a terrible cook. I burn things.”

“I want to wake up in the morning and eat breakfast with you and read The Globe and Mail”

“I could come over for breakfast,” I said. “A late breakfast.”

“I want to brush your hair.”

I began to snivel. I’d once told him Arthur liked brushing my hair; or used to.

“What’s he got that I haven’t got?”

I didn’t know. But I didn’t want him to spoil things, I didn’t want him to become gray and multi-dimensional and complicated like everyone else. Was every Heathcliff a Linton in disguise? What did I want, adventure or security, and which of them offered what? Perhaps neither of them offered either, they both wanted me to offer these things, and once more I was deficient. The Royal Porcupine lay with his head against my stomach, waiting for the answer.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It isn’t that.”

He sat up again. “That’s the trouble with you, you have no motives. Don’t you know how dangerous that is? You’re like an out-of-control school bus.”

“I don’t mean to be,” I said. To make up for it, I bought him a bottle of One-A-Day vitamin pills and a pair of socks and dusted off his stuffed animals. I even gave him my fox, the one that had been Aunt Lou’s. This was a real gift: I valued it. Once it would have delighted him, but he barely glanced at it.

“At least you could tell him about us,” he said. “Sometimes I think you’re ashamed of me.”

But I drew the line at that. “I can’t,” I said, “it would ruin everything. I love you.”

“You’re afraid to take a chance on me,” he said mournfully. “I can see that. I’m not much now, I admit it, but think of the potential!”

“I like you the way you are,” I said, but he couldn’t believe me. It wasn’t that I didn’t love him. I did, in a peculiar way, but I knew I couldn’t live with him. For him, reality and fantasy were the same thing, which meant that for him there was no reality. But for me it would mean there was no fantasy, and therefore no escape.

The next time I stepped out of the freight elevator, there was an ambush waiting for me. The Royal Porcupine was there, but he was no longer the Royal Porcupine. He’d cut his hair short and shaved off his beard. He was standing in the middle of the floor, no cape, no cane, no gloves; just a pair of jeans and a T-shirt that said Honda on it. He was merely Chuck Brewer; had he always been, underneath his beard? He looked plundered.

“My God,” I said, almost screamed. “What did you do that for?”

“I killed him,” Chuck said. “He’s over with, he’s finished.”

I started to cry. “Oh, I forgot these,” he said. He ripped down his picture of the Queen, then his dynamite poster, and threw them onto the pile he’d made of his costumes.

“What about your animals?” I said stupidly.

“I’m getting rid of them,” he said. “They aren’t any good to me now.”

I was staring at his chin; I’d never seen it before. “Now will you move in?” he said. “It doesn’t have to be here, we could get a house.”

It was horrible. He’d thought that by transforming himself into something more like Arthur he could have Arthur’s place; but by doing this he’d murdered the part of him that I loved. I scarcely knew how to console the part that remained. Without his beard, he had the chin of a junior accountant.

I hated myself for thinking this. I felt like a monster, a large, blundering monster, irredeemably shallow. How could I care about his chin at a time like this? I threw my arms about him. I couldn’t do what he wanted, it was all wrong.

“I can tell you aren’t going to,” he said, disengaging my arms. “Well, I guess there’s only one thing to do. How about a double suicide? Or maybe I could shoot you and then jump off the Toronto Dominion Centre with your body in my arms.” He managed a white smile, but he didn’t fool me. He was completely serious.